SF has plans to put skate park in Golden Gate Park

Just a couple of weeks ago, the City Insider told you that San Francisco soon plans to add its second skateboard park in as many years and only the city’s third overall. Now we learn that a fourth is in the offing and that it could occupy a closed and long-dormant section of Waller Street in southeast corner of Golden Gate Park.

The idea had been kicked around for years, but recently gained traction when the city’s Recreation and Park Commission debated what to do with an $80,000 surplus left over from 2008 capital projects that came in under budget. Rich Hillis, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s skate park czar, pushed the idea with the Commission and it was a hit.

City parks spokeswoman Lisa Seitz Gruwell, said that the section of Waller Street has been a “dead zone” mainly used by people test-riding bicycles from the nearby bike shops.

The $80,000 mostly will go to paying for the designs, Seitz-Gruel said. Money for actually building the park has yet to be identified.

Meanwhile, the city is close to completing designs on a new, $1 million skate park on a parking lot in the north Mission District.

Skateboarding is popular in the city, yet illegal nearly everywhere other than neighborhood sidewalks. City law prohibits skateboarding on any city street and any sidewalk in any business district.

The city’s first public skateboarding venue opened at the Potrero del Sol park in the south Mission in 2008 and has been wildly popular, Hillis said. A smaller skate park is located in Crocker Amazon.